Most business, educational, community, and government organizations rely on computer systems to support their business processes. These computer systems have to be deployed and managed by sizable support personnel. Additionally, many organizations require more than one computer system, which is often deployed as a suite and which generally acts in a coordinated manner to realize complex business processes and transactions. These distributed systems are contained within protected zones and bounded within firewalls and access points. But, within the protected zones there is often open communication and cooperation between various managed systems and the services that they host.
The managed systems are often discrete and are capable of acting in concert with other services for providing higher-level composite services. Also, these systems are of various hardware architectures and operating systems, which operate within heterogeneous environments and which offer individual services on presumably the most efficient, reliable, or cost effective architectural platforms.
However, there are few organizations that act/operate with one mind from the top down. Likewise, an organization's managed system may often include many isolated data centers and workgroup productivity centers deployed as duplicate and redundant servers and services. This is done by the enterprise, without really knowing what is already available. In some cases, a new server needs to be deployed having a certain version of an operating system, which supports a unique application and that can only run on a particular device; but, again, the application acts in a coordinated manner with other services that are deployed within the organization.
For example, take a real world scenario of a customer and partner-facing World-Wide Web (WWW) portal for a given enterprise. This would likely need the following components:                Web server(s)        Authentication server(s)        Middle-tier application server(s)        Database server(s)        And other such components.        
These n-tier systems are well understood within the industry, but require real systems to deploy them. In this example, perhaps the fastest performing web server is an Apache running on an openSUSE Linux server, and the best authentication server is Novell eDirectory® running on a NetWare® 6.5 server and the best middle tier application server is some custom application running on Novell SLES 10 and the database server is an Oracle® database running on Solaris® on a Sun® server. Each of these servers is based on hardware that is different from the others in many respects. Some processors are IA32 or IA64 and some are SPARC®. Some Operating Systems (OS's) are closed source and proprietary, while some are open source. A certain department within the organization decides to deploy these servers and services, but they must be maintained and supported and so the organization hires a variety of qualified staff to monitor these servers and services. The hired systems managers often use proprietary, open source, and open standards-based tools such as OpenView, DMTF CIMOM, SNMP, iManager, YaST, command line tools, scripts, and/or other tools to monitor and manage the servers and services.
Problems arise when not just one department within an enterprise deploys these various servers and services, but when multiple departments within the same enterprise do the same thing as one another. When this happens, there are two web servers, two database servers, two authentication services. Many solutions exist today to synchronize data between these systems, but a problem still remains when multiple Information Technology (IT) staff and resources are assigned to manage servers and services that perhaps should and probably could be consolidated together.
Another issue is when a systems manager locates various servers and services (IP address, LAN subnet, URL, port, or other location/identification mechanism) and then groups them into management groups that make sense to that system administrator, but perhaps does not make sense to another systems administrator from another department.
Thus, improved techniques for system management are needed.